My Wife Wants You to Know I'm Happily Married by Joey Franklin

Author:Joey Franklin [Franklin, Joey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780803284821
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2015-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

I came home from Japan eager to pursue dance in college, eager to travel the country as part of a team, maybe even travel the world. Perhaps I’d even marry a dancer. It all seemed such an irresistibly romantic notion—the way dance could hold a couple together: such an easy metaphor, such an easy date idea.

My first year of college at Brigham Young University, I gave it a try. BYU has the largest dance program in the country, and the entry-level social dance classes were a gateway to if not fame and fortune, then at least a college career as an amateur dancer. If you wanted to make it onto one of BYU’s award-winning teams, you had to start at the intro level. That semester, all beginning ballroom classes were full, so I signed up for western social dance, where I learned the two-step.

For men, the Texas two-step is all about the buckle—the cowboy badge of cool, a place to rest one’s hand when it’s not holding onto one’s partner, a steering wheel, a pivot point, a pole around which the cowboy turns. The buckle and the boots, and the heeling and toeing and swinging like a man slouched at a bar, resembled everything I loved about swing, but it had a lazy locomotion, both casual and proper—a dance version of southern hospitality.

Right about this time, I began dating a girl named Melissa. She was tall, with dark hair and a cautious smile, and she had a thing for modern architecture and strawberry Life Savers. We’d started dating in Portland before coming to Utah for school, and one of the first things I wanted to know about her was whether or not she danced. Did her toes tap in the car? Did she twirl in the kitchen to the radio? Had she ever sweat through her shirt on a dance floor? I played country music on the radio when I picked her up for a first date to gauge her reaction, and on our third date, I took her down to that old Masonic Temple dance hall for a baptism by fire.

That was my first time back to the dance hall in years, and I was surprised to see the orchestra replaced by a CD player. In the two years I had been gone, the floors had been neglected, and the lighting had somehow lost its charm. And when I took Melissa by the hand and walked her out to the middle of the floor, it didn’t take long for me to realize that she was in unfamiliar territory. She followed me around the floor the whole night, rock-stepping and ball-changing her way through a crash course in the four-step swing, the Charleston, and a simplified imitation of the Lindy Hop that I’d picked up in high school. We weren’t the graceful work of art I’d hoped for—not much to look at with our knee-knocking and toe-mashing and aerial lifts that only narrowly avoided crash landings. But if she hadn’t

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